Airport can go fly, says Wilton

It may be another rumour but the community is steeling itself to fight.

By David Humphries

April 14, 2012 — 3.00am

Growing up in Hurstville and Carlton, Philip Parker learnt early in life the consequences of proximity to an airport. A former geography teacher, he's now a man of the cloth, preaching the faith to the good Anglican parishioners of Picton and Wilton, but he recalls clearly speculation in his primary school years that a second Sydney airport was imminent. Reverend Parker is now 57.

Wilton is a village 80 kilometres south-west of Sydney, just off the Hume Highway and near where weekend travellers play spot the parachutists gliding to terra firma. It's home to a few hundred souls seemingly content with relative insignificance but now confronted by two great and incompatible challenges to their rustic anonymity.

Not on their patch … the Bingara Gorge development adjacent to the old Wilton village.Credit:Sahlan Hayes

They can be swamped by the engine thunder of jets departing and arriving at a new Sydney airport the federal government wants to build nearby or they can be enveloped by urban encroachment - housing estates projected to ultimately fill this ideal slice of city outskirts with a population the equal of Canberra's. Getting neither is high on the wish-list, but not on the cards.

''Discussion of an airport here has been going on so long that people take it with a grain of salt,'' says Parker. Until it reaches the next level - a government go-ahead - Parker suspects community rumblings will remain a hum. ''There's more emphasis on urban sprawl and how that affects the local area, because that's real. The airport thing is ethereal; it comes and goes.''

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The mayor of Wollondilly, Col Mitchell, right, with his deputy, Luke Johnson.Credit:Sahlan Hayes

It's not ennui; more a case of ''we'll believe it when we see it''. And until then, leave us alone. Make no mistake: people of the southern Macarthur don't want a major airport in their backyard, but they suspect talk of it will go the way of decades of similar speculation.

Talk of war, so far at least, is dominated by local politicians reading the pulse. The Wollondilly state MP, Jai Rowell, said an airport would be built ''over my dead body'' because his constituents ''did not sign up for this''. The federal MP, Alby Schultz, agrees. Based on constituent feedback alone, he said, he was ''totally opposed'' to a Wilton airport.

Leading the local charge will be a campaign co-ordinated by the councils of Wollondilly (based on Picton), Campbelltown and Camden. Wollondilly is pressing its neighbours to contribute to a $100,000 fighting fund.

''There is no room for compromise on the issue of a second airport in south-west or western Sydney and we will fight this issue wholeheartedly to the end,'' their mayors, Col Mitchell, Anoulack Chanthivong and Greg Warren respectively, said in a joint statement after a meeting a month ago.

Philip Parker.Credit:Sahlan Hayes

''The residents of the Macarthur region must not be penalised in terms of their health and wellbeing, their lifestyle opportunities, their access to future housing, as well as employment and economic development opportunities, under any circumstance.''

But these goals are open to compromise regardless of the airport. The addition of tens of thousands of homes over the next 30 years, if developers get their way, would alter lifestyle options irretrievably. Like an echo of Badgerys Creek, where housing growth frustrated airport planners with political and environmental headaches, housing estates already are knocking at Wilton's gate.

And with the state government hoping to rezone in June the land for housing, there's every sign Macquarie Street will try to stymie the airport at every turn.

Lend Lease's Bingara Gorge, a manicured golfing estate adjacent to the old Wilton village, got off to a poor start with a launch in 2008 but has a tenth of its projected 3500 population.

At the invitation of the state government, developers have nominated 29,000 sites in Wollondilly, and the developer Lang Walker has indicated plans to open 60,000 sites between Wilton and Appin over the next 30 years.

The consequences on lifestyle, underwritten by the three-council pact, already are occupying locals. Then there's the question of whether rejection of a $3 billion airport, with many thousands of jobs, is consistent with enhanced employment and economic opportunity.

''But wouldn't these jobs be created somewhere else, too?'' Mitchell responded. ''Put the airport where people want it - Newcastle or Goulburn. Jobs would be mostly for imported people anyway. We're happy the way we are.''

The airport option has come and gone many times for Wilton. It was around first when Mitchell was Wollondilly mayor a decade ago. It has popped up over the years as other sites have risen and fallen by the wayside, as happened to Galston in Sydney's north-west. Hissing voters in the federal seat of Parramatta so annoyed Gough Whitlam during campaigning for a 1973 byelection (won by Philip Ruddock) that he turned on his audience and thundered: ''And you've got Galston.'' Of course, it never came to pass.

Now, however, federal government enthusiasm for Wilton (and the willingness of the Transport and Infrastructure Minister, Anthony Albanese, to wage a public brawl with the determinedly resistant NSW Premier, Barry O'Farrell) has raised the site to its highest profile yet.

A Wilton airport is no foregone conclusion, not least because of the miserable stop-start history of a second Sydney basin airport and because the federal Labor government is unlikely to be around to prosecute the case for Wilton beyond next year.

O'Farrell pledged before his election a year ago not to ''dump'' aircraft noise on the people of western Sydney, where Liberals went on to win in landslides. But he is under pressure to relent, not just from business, from his own MPs affected by existing aircraft noise and from those devising his 20-year infrastructure plan for NSW, but from federal colleagues likely to have a big say in the next government.

The shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, for instance, branded as absurd O'Farrell's preference for a $10 billion to $25 billion fast train to an expanded Canberra airport.

Wilton was in the mix until the Hawke government chose Badgerys Creek as the airport site and began acquiring 1700 hectares between Liverpool and Penrith in 1986. It was still second fiddle to Badgerys Creek when the joint federal-state review reported last month that the capacity of Kingsford Smith airport would be exhausted by 2030 and that government had just five years to begin construction of a second airport. ''If Badgerys Creek is ruled out,'' the review said in a 3200-page report, ''Wilton is the next best site and processes should be put in train to secure the site and undertake the full environmental assessment and airport planning processes required to protect and prepare the site for future development.''

Mitchell says: ''We got fired up when running second to Badgerys Creek. This time the fight steps up.''

Wollondilly shire had 10,000 people when Mitchell arrived as a council bureaucrat. Now, it's 45,000 and the council is keen to co-operate with state government plans to open its space to thousands of new housing blocks. White-collar commuters know just how difficult is the task of making a Wilton airport viable. The M5 is the main link to the city - and is probably Sydney's worst performing road - and the nearest commuter trains are up to an hour away.

And without state co-operation, the Commonwealth would need to compulsorily acquire hundreds of hectares of water catchment reserve, much of it forest, for clearing. Would Labor want a brawl over Sydney water security and tree protection? The Wollondilly end takes heart from challenges confronting the Wilton proposal, particularly the denial of essential state services - fast public transport, road access, water, electricity and planning - implied in the O'Farrell stance.

''The state government is going to say no,'' said Mitchell, hoping that might be the end of it. If it was only that simple.

There is formal process of government (co-operation undoubtedly would make the Commonwealth task easier) and reality. How might a state government ignore the demands of a big slab of its biggest city by turning its back on relief from unsustainable urban pressure? An airport reality would suck the most reluctant state government into its vortex. We're no closer to a verdict, therefore.